When I woke up this morning I had another Sophie B. Hawkins song (Don’t Stop Swaying) stuck in my head so I thought I’d listen to the album. Listening to it I was so struck by how much those lyrics reproduced above speak to my situation. I slept solidly last night mostly due to the fact that I hadn’t slept at all the night before that. I laid in bed all night but I didn’t close my eyes. I was driven by a fire of my own, a compulsion, a desire. A confused desire perhaps. I wanted to feel like I mattered to someone – anyone – and was determined to do whatever was required to feel like I was important to at least one human being.

The truth is I am deeply conflicted. I have all these ideas about romantic love and sex that seem to circle around each other but which don’t always seem to coincide. I want to be loved and I want to be loved. I laugh to myself at that sentence because it seems contrived but I hope the emphasis is understood. I guess in a large part this is what this is about – a conflict between romantic aspirations and raging hormones and sexual desires. I want it all and I want it now. Though if I’m being honest I don’t think I can have it all. Part of me wants to settle to have at least some of that. But what parts do you pursue and which do you forget?

I was propositioned recently by an enthusiastic charming individual. And honestly I was deeply flattered (perhaps in the most literal sense of that word), and a little curious, but I know from my own relationship history (as limited as it is) that sex without love leaves me feeling cold. A part of me – the desperate delusional part that dreams of running away with the circus long after it has left town – wondered though if it might be the beginning of something else, something better. And to this person’s credit they were very frank and honest about the realities of the situation and their intentions. It helped bring clarity, and completely destroyed the lofty imaginings taking place inside my head. I guess if I’m being completely honest I always hope someone will come and rescue me from my life and myself. Though clearly we live in a world that is markedly different to the one I imagine.

And it’s funny that I should be listening to Sophie B. Hawkins this morning because in a sense I feel like I’ve come full circle. Because this album Tongues and Tails is more or less a tribute to all that desire, to all manner of desires really, often conflicting ones. It’s murky and messy, and, maybe, when it works, wonderful. I guess what Sophie has that I don’t is a faith in forces – natural, romantic, spiritual. An expectation that things will work out and that things are worth working towards.

But you know what I like most about this? Madonna is actually singing, and her voice is full and rich. She’s not screaming (as she seems to do for some of larger stadium shows) and for a song that’s been recorded by everyone from Elvis to Peggy Lee her phrasing is truly her own.

Marion Maddox:

Well growth is certainly a big part of it. Growth in numbers, growth in excitement, growth in the feeling that something’s happening, there’s always something very exciting about to happen. God is going to deliver something wonderful for us any minute now. One of the features of mega churches is that they have what sociologists of religion call a high level of churn, so other churches often look within the mega churches and notice that they have a real demographic bubble around 18-30 age group, but it’s an interesting thing that a mega church that has been going for 20 years, 20 years ago had that same demographic bubble of the 18-30s and still has that same demographic bubble, so they’re not the same people who were there 20 years ago. People often say, ‘A wide front door, but a lot of small back doors’. People come in but they also move out.

One reason for that is that the vision is all about growth and positiveness and being who you want to be and just as the leader visions what the church should be, individuals are encouraged to vision who they want to be, and this works very well, as long as you’re getting promotions and your career’s on the up, and your family’s growing. It doesn’t sustain you so well when your spouse gets a terminal illness or one of your children runs into serious difficulties, or you yourself face life crises of one sort of another to be turning up to church where every week there are praise notices about everyone else in the congregation, who’s finally got the house or the car or the job they wanted and these things are prayed for and given thanks for when they happen, can be a dispiriting message if you’re not getting there.

Happy Sunday!

We make judgments about people all of the time. We make them instinctively. But how do we make sure they are informed? If I see you standing on a street corner how do I decide if you’re a friendly face or Jack the Ripper? It’s even more difficult online – not because the Internet is, as is sometimes suggested by the media, a breeding ground for the latter – because you often don’t have access to factors like body language, vocal intonation and emphasis and eye contact (or lackthereof).

But even in face-to-face communications what often isn’t immediately obvious is what lurks beneath the surface, the emotional turmoil that exists underneath a particular facade. Somebody blew up at me earlier this week and while it was disconcerting in the moment the more I thought about it the more apparent it became to me that it probably didn’t have anything to do with me. Though it was directed firmly at me. The language used seemed to imply that I was somehow the problem. It hardly seemed to matter that this person had got the wrong end of a very long stick.

Understanding this helped me. But the whole situation has made me reticent to interact with people I don’t already have a relationship with. I mean, potentially any combination of words, emoticons, even an arched eyebrow can be misconstrued. They might think I hate them – or that I like them. [And perversely it was the latter that proved problematic this week. lol]

I used to think there was something scary or risky about being misunderstood in the process of creating art, but actually that seems like a walk in the park by comparison. Well I mean that’s not always the case. I am no doubt helped by the fact that the world at large is mostly indifferent to the things I create so the whole issue is moot. [As an aside I used to think people were being unduly critical and intolerant of Cat Stevens once he became a devout Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. But there's one thing I cannot resolve - and that is his role as one of the major proponents of the case for a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for penning The Satanic Verses. Where was Stevens' Peace Train then?] Clearly being misunderstood in art is a problem for many, and sometimes the consequences are quite serious. As Julia Cameron notes people often shoot the messenger.

So… how do you do it? How do you decide who to befriend and when and why and how?

Just feeling bogged down and squished. Actually ‘squished’ is not a word I would use normally, but it seems apt. Like the few specks of possibility on the landscape are disappearing and I’m being pressed down, slowly crushed by the weight of harsh realities. I never know who to talk to. I never know who I can talk to. I get depressed a lot and I am sure certain people avoid me because of this, because they don’t know what to say or how I’ll react. But I’m just disillusioned.

Somebody left a comment on this video. The timing seems quite fitting. I actually forget this video exists sometimes, that I made it. But I did. I am proud of it, actually. I like the editing. I think it explains something I needed to articulate.

The title of the video is actually an allusion to a Tori Amos song, ‘Silent All These Years.’

Years go by will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand?

I don’t have anything particularly interesting or profound to say right now. I just felt bad that I haven’t blogged in such a long time. I hope you’re all doing okay…

It makes sense to avoid conflicts that you aren’t certain you can win. But what if your confidence takes a beating and you can lack the perspective and clarity to know which battles you have a chance to win? Well, everything looks terrifying. You avoid everything. You run like hell whenever something different shows up. It might be something delicious, something deeply rewarding – but why take the chance? You practice a rather foolish level of containment and there’s no joy to be had there. But it feels safe. The keyword there is feel. The state is as illusory as the feeling.

Of course it’s one thing to understand this intellectually… another entirely when you are in the moment gripped with a sense of impending potential horrors. Meh.

I look at her curiously for a moment.

“Because some people have been telling me how impressed they were to see a young person wearing a t-shirt with a religious message.”

My mother knows me well enough to realise I don’t possess such a t-shirt, and I laugh to myself at the source of the confusion.

One of my favourite computer games is DOOM. I couldn’t tell you much about the game’s storyline but essentially you go around killing monsters and people. I played it when I was in high school, infact after a particularly gruelling day it seemed therapeutic to put the cheats on and take my frustrations out on these pixellated characters.

Some months ago I decided to honour a few of my different interests by buying tshirts about them from RedBubble. I bought one tshirt with a Space Invader character on it, another that featured a scifi pulp magazine cover artwork, Mario (of Super Mario Brothers) with his arm up in the air and in the style and colour of those Obama posters. And I also bought a tshirt design inspired by the Doom computer game.

The Doom shirt reads:

IDDQD: The Secret To Eternal Life

This isn’t a religious message – at least not of any religion I am familiar with – it is the cheat code for so-called ‘God Mode’. The secret to eternal life is super powers and invicibility… not saviour via Jesus Christ.

It made me laugh anyway.

Happy Sunday!

As I scribbled down this mantra a funny thing happened. It seemed to work. I started admitting things to myself that I hadn’t before.

I don’t know how to make my life work. I don’t know how to pursue the kind of career I want to pursue. I don’t know how to make people care about me or the things I do. I don’t know if I have value. I try to assure myself that I do, but I wonder… I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can do it myself. I don’t even know who to ask for help. So mostly I just fantasize over someone saving me from my wretched life. A lover.

Only… on some level I am pretty sure that won’t work. I can’t really compartmentalise my existence and start again. Even with the support of a lover, no matter how spectacularly I imagine them to be. There are things I need to do to sort out my life first, things I need to do to make peace with myself and the world around me. Right now I am in many respects a broken individual. Taking all that stuff into a relationship will only damage the relationship.

But… instead of acknowledging this stuff and start working on it, I look for reasons – excuses – to feel bad and disempowered. I throw myself at people’s feet and if they don’t respond to me in the way I desire I decide that there is no point, that I’ll never be happy, that there’s no point in trying anything at all. [Admittedly I have a chequered relationship history so it's not difficult to find evidence to support a "nobody has ever loved you or ever will" type scenario.] Because… I know how to feel bad and while I do not enjoy it, I can do it. The things I have to do to move on with my life terrify me. It feels familiar, stable, to stay trapped.

But there are ways in which I do feel genuinely victimised. This world is an inhospitable place for many people for many reasons, and for one particular reason that I do not intend to disclose here it seems particularly brutal to me. I don’t see why I should suffer because of the intolerance of those around me. It doesn’t seem fair that I should be so fearful. There’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of things I realise I cannot control. And as much as I would like to operate with cold mechanical detachment, I can’t do that either. The love and support of family and friends is important to me. And the idea that I might lose either seems heartbreaking beyond words. I worry I would not survive such an outcome.

But where I live now emotionally makes me so unhappy. The facade that creates a superficial sense of stability also breeds such inner turmoil.

I just want someone to tell me everything will be alright. Although, if I’m being completely honest, I’m not entirely sure I’d believe them even if they did.

So what should you do when you experience rejection and some of the feelings that accompany it? Well, you should do something to reaffirm your sense of self. This might seem curious but I was amazed at how effective it was for me recently. Go revisit that thing you created, or that thing that you’re passionate about. It is wonderful how this will bring you away from the (at times quite nebular) criticisms you receive and deliver you back to a sense of your own self and your own worth.

And if that fails consider injecting some Annie Lennox-esque flippancy into your day.

(The plate smashing is optional.)

When I think back to shopping expeditions as a kid I remember feeling really constrained by the fashion trends and the stock available in local shops. It seemed each year one or two notable trends was in vogue and that basically dictated what you could and could not purchase. (This was particularly aggravating the year Hawaiian floral patterns made a comeback.) I remember wanting plain clothes, solid colours – black and blue predominantly. I didn’t want to wear brand names. It didn’t matter if they were prestigious ones or not, I always felt like if I wasn’t being paid I didn’t want to be some corporation’s walking talking billboard.

In an odd way I didn’t want to fit in or stand out, rather I wanted to fade into the background of everything. I’m not sure what it was about solid black and blue tshirts (for example) that made me think they were suitable camouflage for suburbia, but I am pretty sure I did think that.

I started putting away my new purchases. I don’t give my wardrobe a lot of consideration, but in that moment I was struck by how different times in my life could be characterised by the clothes within that wardrobe. There was the ‘black and blue’ moments of my teenage years. There were the ‘winter at my former workplace’ clothes – long heavy garments, as if I was going on vacation to the snow (it never snowed there, but somehow it often felt like it could have).

There was that time when my social circle extended to include people younger than myself. They had a fun almost flippant attitude to fashion and they did much at the time to help me take myself less seriously. A studded belt made it’s way into my wardrobe (though it never did actually fit me) and those pair of Dunlop Volleys with the checkered patten. My “emo” shoes. At one point I made a silly video to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love and as she sung “Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake and I’ll be two steps on the water” I threw the shoes out of the video frame.

There was the thick heavy faux leather jacket I bought in Canberra the first time I saw my idol Sophie B. Hawkins tour Australia. It was so cold that I put it on as soon as I got out of the shop. When I returned to my friend’s accommodation on the university campus and she saw I was wearing it with the tags still on it, she wondered if I had actually paid for it. (I had.) And there was another jacket, this one real leather, ridiculously expensive, but somehow I knew I had to have it. I was amazed that it fit to be honest. And you loved that jacket, and I loved you, and – unfortunately – you did not love me. And it’s strange how just looking at that article of clothing can bring all that back in a moment.

So… clothing is still a strange thing. Even now.